Looking For Economic Ways For Printing

By Author: Lily Gamble
Total Articles: 37
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Printing has a long history. First stated by the Chinese in the 3rd century AD it was originally done by carving onto blocks. Even today in China and Japan each person's signature is in fact a stamp. Company's and important people have very special stamps made up each of which ha unique patterns surrounding the Chinese characters which make them unique and binding.

Printing progressed across the world and Roman Egyptian printing in the 4th century there are instances of woodblock printing on cloth.

Gutenberg in the 15th century is credited with the first press of a modern type where the letters were held in looms and the inking and impressions enabled the production of many books and singlehandedly released the human from being dependant on the verbal acceptance of knowledge not controlled by either he politicians, or the church.

In fact if one was to trace the explosion in human knowledge it was the fact that many could now get an education. The stranglehold that was kept on knowledge by the church and places like the University of Timbuktu which had its golden age of scholarly development while Europe ...
... was living in the dark ages.

The explosion of knowledge has progressed at an ever exponential rate and even today printing is a huge part of the way we, as humans, learn things and transact with one another. The development of typewrites, photocopiers and even network color printers has not demolished the need for external printers.

In the current age of the Kindle and the competitors from Apple and Google paperless 'books' are being disseminated. Indeed as these devices get more and more pervasive certainly some effect is bound to be felt by the printing industry but this may yet be many years off yet. It is more than apparent that the need for printed documents will still be there.

But the pervasiveness of the printed document is reducing. Gone are the days when each desk or each secretary had their own printer attached to the Word processor/PC on their desks. Any company that has a Local Area Network is almost certainly have a LAN printer for the entire office. And because of broadband it is now possible to connect the LANs in different offices together so that if one is working in Washington it is possible, provided you know the IP address, to print a document on the LAN printer in a Los Angeles office.

This being the case how do the printing companies survive? Very simple. There is a crucial critical level where it no longer makes economic sense to print in house as a printing company can print documents, books, business cards, brochures, pamphlets and advertising material faster, more efficiently and cheaper than one could do it on the in house printer.

cheap printing services abound and there are many to choose from. These enable a business to publish certain things rapidly and with many special effects that and in-house printer could not do, and at a fraction of the running cost. Running a full color LAN printer with a large capacity is costly in the fact that not only does paper type fairly limited but the replacement cartridges are hugely expensive.

So most businesses keep cheap printing services on hand to do the bigger printing jobs required.